UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two OK Films, One Great Miniseries

Burt Needham Crashes Some More Cars.

The Fall Guy (2024. Written by Drew Pearce, based on the television series created by Glen A. Larson. Anywhere between 121 and 126 minutes, depending on your source)

With a name like Colt Seavers, what else could he be but a stuntman? So the film starts off with him making a fall from a very high place in a tall building. It’s clear he is a stuntman, since we see the wires attached to him, the crew, and his girlfriend Jody Moreno, who is a camera operator. But the stunt goes wrong and he breaks his back.

Eighteen months later he is still recuperating and working as a valet parking driver. Then he gets a call from Gail, who is producing Jody’s first film as a director, a big sci-fi epic that looks like every other sci-fi epic ever made. Gail tells him that Jody really, really wants him to come back to work as a stuntman on the film.

He is reluctant, but he is still sweet on Jody, although they broke up after the accident. So he semi-reluctantly flies off to Australia to discover…Jody did not want him back at all. Look at how Pearce and David Leitch, the director, drag out the scene of him back on the set and Jody realizing he’s there.

So we get the scene of Jody and Colt dealing with him being back. Colt is Ryan Gosling and Jody is Emily Blunt. Their scenes together are a dictionary definition of chemistry. I felt sorry for the film’s editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir for having to decide how to cut between Gosling and Blunt’s close-ups. We want to watch all of them.

These first scenes set up the picture as a rom-com, which it is…among other things. Pretty soon a plot-like substance shows up. Gail has tricked Colt to come since Tom, the star of the picture they are shooting, has disappeared. She needs Colt to find him. Or at least that is what she tells him.

We are now into the plot (a goodly portion of what I told turns out not to be true), which involves Colt trying to track down Tom. That makes for lots of scenes with Colt using all of his stuntman skills to avoid getting killed.

Drew Pearce, the screenwriter, has been the writer or co-writer of several big action pictures, including Iron Man 3 (2013), Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (2015), and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw (2019). You can see my review of the latter here, for a theoretical analysis of the structure of action films. David Leitch has even more experience with action films. He was a stuntman for years, and he directed Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw and 2022’s Bullet Train, among others.

The problem with The Fall Guy is that it starts off being one movie and turns into another. And the first one is more interesting to watch. When Colt goes off to find Tom, we miss the scenes with Jody. I think Pearce and Leitch realized the problem, and they have included scenes with Jody without Colt while he is off having adventures. At one point Jody sings at a karaoke bar, a scene that could easily have been cut, but they want to keep us thinking about Jody.

In the last three quarters of the film we get more and more stunt scenes. A lot of them are wonderful, including the grand finale, but they get tiresome if you are waiting around to see Ryan and Emily do the things they do so well.

The picture opened reasonably well at the box office, but not with the blockbuster numbers some people expected. That may be a good thing. If it was a bigger hit, Gosling and Blunt may have been forced into sequel after sequel.

In the 70s and early 80s, Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. But he kept making car crash movies, usually directed by former stuntman turned-director Hal Needham. The early ones did very well at the box office, but audiences simply got tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. Reynolds’s star began to fade. He did good work in movies like Boogie Nights (1997) and The Last Movie Star (2017), but he was not the star he was before.

What’s the Title of That, Oh, You Know, That Sweaty, Sexy, Zendaya Tennis Movie?

Challengers (2024. Written by Justin Kuritzkes. 131 minutes.)

We are at a tennis match in 2019 between Art and Patrick, in the middle of which we cut back to seventeen years before, where we learn they have been friends and rivals for years, and then we cut to when they first see Tashi. She is not only a great tennis player, still in her teens, but gorgeous. Well, she is played by Zendaya, who is also one of the producers of the film. Among Zendaya’s other skills, she knows how to pick projects for herself.

And then we cut to, well, some other time, and then to another time, and back to the big tennis match we started with and then to some other time. And pretty soon we are having a really hard time keeping up. Kuritzkes is good at writing scenes, but they are so jumbled together we spend most of our time trying to figure out how this connects to that.

I have the sneaking suspicion that Kuritzkes may have written the script in chronological order and someone, probably the director Luca Guadagnino decided it would be more artistic to reshuffle the scenes.

It’s not more artistic. It is just a mess. It is not that you can not play with time in a movie. Orson Welles & Herman Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane (1941), Federico Fellini and his team of writers, 8 ½ (1963), to name two best known. But those guys knew how to construct a movie so it was relatively easy to follow. OK, Fellini was a trickster, making us think we know where we are, but then pulling the rug out from under us.

Kuritzkes and Guadagnino do not seem to be able to do that. True, they do have titles that give the specifics, although one title late in the film just says “Midnight,” without telling us whether it was the midnight before or after the big events. You will eventually figure it out. The time-jumping in this film kills the momentum of the film.

This is Kuritzkes’s first feature. His past experience has been mostly in videos. In short films, you can get away with all kinds of jumping around, but you need a clearer and more substantial structure in a two-hour-plus film. If it was indeed Kuritzkes who wrote the script that way, he should have had his wife read it. She is Celine Song, who wrote and directed last year’s lovely Past Lives, which covers a lot of time in a clearer way.

The actors do what they can to save the film. Zendaya is not only gorgeous and sexy, but an absolutely compelling presence on screen. You can see why she gets cast in leading roles.

Patrick, the free-wheeling one, is played by Josh O’Connor. You may have seen him as Prince Charles in the miniseries The Crown (2019-2020), and this is a big leap from that. Art, the straight-laced one who marries Tashi, is played by Mike Faist, who did not make much of an impression on me as Riff in the 2021 version of West Side Story, but who makes much more of an impact here.

You might want to see this movie just to watch these three actors at work, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself not knowing when and where you are a lot of the time.

And What Has Your Significant Other Done For You Lately?

A Gentleman in Moscow (2024. Created for television by Ben Vanstone; 6 episodes written by Ben Vanstone, 1 episode teleplay by Ben Vanstone; 1 episode based on teleplay by Susie Conklin; 1 episode based on teleplay by Stewart Harcourt; 1 episode written for television by Nessah Muthy; based on the novel by Amor Towles. [And no, I cannot explain all those different categories. It may be that some of the script materials were from earlier attempts to produce a series]. 8 episodes, approximately 55 minutes each.)

Several years ago the actor Mary Elizabeth Winstead was reading Amor Towles’s 2016 best-selling novel. Winstead is married to actor Ewan McGregor. They met when they co-starred in the third season of Fargo. He played both Stussy brothers and she played Nikki Swango. You can read my review here.

I suppose they had so much fun acting together they decided to get married. So Winstead is reading the book and realizes the character of Count Alexander would be perfect for her hubby.

Boy, was she right. There were earlier attempts to make a miniseries, with actors such as Kenneth Branagh as the Count. Luckily for McGregor, those attempts did not work out. I love Branagh’s work, but I cannot imagine him being as good or better than McGregor.

Alexander comes from a family of Russian aristocrats (the miniseries does not have as much background as the novel, which I have not read, seems to). When his other relatives die off, he goes to live in the plush Hotel Metropol in Moscow. After the Russian Revolution, he avoids being shot because he wrote a poem that seemed to be sympathetic to the proletariat. A childhood friend of his, Mishka now has some influence in the (Communist---for those of you too young to remember) Party and persuades the Party not to execute him.

In the first episode, Alexander is forced to live in the hotel and will never be allowed to leave it. Alas, he is not allowed to stay in his luxurious suite, but moved to a small room in the attic. (He eventually finds other rooms he can expand into and even a way to get out of the room in the semi-fresh air of 1920s Moscow.)

Before you think just hanging out in one location for eight episodes will be boring, let me just mention five words to you: John Michael Hayes, Rear Window (1954). And the writers bring in all kinds of interesting characters (two other words: Grand Hotel [1932]). We get a wonderful sense of the changes in Russian life from the 1920s to the 1950s, shown by the people who come and go.

In another miniseries that I will write about next month, The Regime (2024), there are lavish sets of all kinds, but they are not used as well as the sets in Gentleman are. Remember, you are not only writing for actors and directors, but for the set designers as well.

As Alexander begins to adjust to his new station, he meets interesting people. In the first couple of episodes, he makes a friend of Nina, a young girl who is also staying at the hotel. They play games and Alexander shows his gentlemanly side. Then her parents take her away. But she shows up later as a grown-up and at one point comes to the hotel with her small daughter. She gives the daughter, Sofia, to Alexander and asks him to take care of her while she goes off to Siberia with her husband. We never see or hear from her again.

Alexander is beginning to understand how the system works and convinces the management Sofia is a relation of his. Sofia turns into an excellent pianist and is awarded a trip to Paris to perform. Alexander has an American contact who might be able to manage to get her to America if she can skip out on her watchdog in Paris. If she is discovered, everybody will be in danger.

Meanwhile, early in his stay, Alexander has a quickie or two or three with Anna, a beautiful actress. She runs afoul of the political system, as shown in a sequence where she and her friends are expecting Joseph Stalin (yes, that Stalin) to show up at a party celebrating her latest play. His car arrives at the hotel, but he never bothers to get out.

As the hotel staff begins to take down the banners with Stalin’s picture on them, Anna and Alexander get in the elevator to go up to their rooms. They are not looking at each other, but we can feel the emotional connection between them.

Well, no wonder. Winstead realized the part of Anna was a pretty good role for her. I cannot tell from the summaries of the book I found on the internet if Anna is as major a character in the novel as she becomes in the miniseries. But who would want to pass up to cast McGregor and Winstead together?

Anna is not as deeply written as Alexander, so Winstead does not get to show her stuff as much as McGregor does. He captures every, and I mean every, emotional nuance of the character. I think it is the finest of his performances I have seen. If you are a screenwriter, look at how much the writers give McGregor to work with; if you are an actor, look at how he works with what they gave him.

So, in 1953 Sofia goes off to Paris. What are Alexander and Anna planning? She is going to the train station to catch the train to Finland. Alex will catch the same train and from Finland, they will get a boat to New York, where they will rejoin Soifia.

But as Anna stands on the platform, Osip, who had been the Party’s watcher over Alexander (their relationship is the most complex in the series; I wish I could go into it more, but that would be a whole other column; good miniseries are like that), comes to Anna and gives her a note, supposedly from Alexander. She stands there trying to decide what to do.

Off and on during the miniseries we have heard a woman narrating, but only now we find out it has been the adult Sofia. She says she never saw her “parents” again and did not know what happened to them. But we see what happened to them and no, I am not going to tell you.